


Frozen Devotion

by nesrynfaliq



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: ACOWAR, Alternative Perspective, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nesta's POV, acowar spoilers, alternative POV, it's not a true otp unless I've written patch-up fic for them, patch-up trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 09:10:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10941387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nesrynfaliq/pseuds/nesrynfaliq
Summary: ACOWAR Chapter 56 - Nesta’s POV. Cassian returns from battle, exhausted and injured, Nesta tends to him. (Dialogue from ACOWAR)‘A flicker of pain pulses through her wrist and she jumps from her place by the fire, startling Feyre, but she barely looks at her sister. Her focus is still consumed on him, striding towards them and looking like he’s walked out of the mouth of hell itself. That scaled black armour still covers him, his helmet tucked under one arm. For all the world he appears fine but the red stones that contain his power, usually pulsing, like hearts worn upon his skin, and now they’re dull, lifeless, his power drained, unable to help him or heal him.“You’re hurt.” The words had blurted out of her before she’d quite joined the dots between what she was seeing before her and what she had felt. But she knows that she’s right.’





	Frozen Devotion

**Author's Note:**

> Unedited (as so many things are these days, I apologise, writing is Hard, editing is Harder)

Her hands had been shaking when she had first offered to help Feyre cut up linen for bandages in the aftermath of the battle. She had needed to  _do_ something, had needed to focus her mind and stop it racing and spinning and panicking about him. 

He was a general. He was over five hundred years old. He had likely fought in more battles than she’d drawn breaths in her entire life. He was widely heralded as the greatest warrior in Prythian’s history and yet...Ever since he had left for that field worry had been tying her stomach into tight knots. 

Anger had flared at that, at the feelings that had risen in her, ones that had plagued her in that cabin, of being useless. He was out there fighting in a war. He was battling, changing things, _doing_ something. While she sat in camp and wrung her hands. Amren had insisted there was more to life than war and bloodshed, more to strength than the ability to lift and wave a sword around. Nesta knew that, accepted it, thrived with that knowledge even...But it did not stop the worry or the feelings that had been threatening to tear her apart. So she had found something that she could do, something that she could help with. 

It was oddly hypnotic, watching the fabric slice cleanly between the jaws of her shears. It helped distract her, sitting there beside Feyre, finally feeling as though she was  _doing_  something. The task was repetitive and mind numbing and she soon lost herself in the rhythm of it, letting it sweep her up and carry her away. It reminded her of dancing, a hundred years ago, when she’d been a child, and would follow the same pattern of moves over and over and over until she had it perfect, until her body moved without needing her instruction, until- 

A log in the fire split with a loud crack, casting sparks into the darkening sky around them like a hand tossing a handful of glittering red stars into the night. Looking up, distracted for the first time in hours, she sees him, walking beside his High Lord, both seeming exhausted and weary but. Safe. Whole. Home. 

A flicker of pain pulses through her wrist and she jumps from her place by the fire, startling Feyre, but she barely looks at her sister. Her focus is still consumed on him, striding towards them and looking like he’s walked out of the mouth of hell itself. That scaled black armour still covers him, his helmet tucked under one arm. For all the world he appears fine but the red stones that contain his power, usually pulsing, like hearts worn upon his skin, and now they’re dull, lifeless, his power drained, unable to help him or heal him. 

“You’re hurt.” The words had blurted out of her before she’d quite joined the dots between what she was seeing before her and what she had felt. But she knows that she’s right. 

Rhys starts beside his general but she ignores him, still staring at Cassian, daring him to deny it. She strides around the fire to him, skirts swirling around her ankles, the feeling familiar and oddly comforting in this strange, brutal world that both calls to her and screams that she does not belong here. 

“It’s fine,” he murmurs thickly, each word weighed down by his exhaustion. 

She ignores him, reaching for his arm, refusing to break eye contact with him. She wonders, briefly, how Feyre and her High Lord might read into her knowing Cassian is hurt when neither of them had detected it but- But she doesn’t give a damn. They’re welcome to think what they like, talk about what they like too. 

He hesitates a moment before yielding to her will. Ever since she’s been small she’s been able to compel men to do what she wants. It had been unconscious to begin with, she hadn’t realised what she was doing differently to anyone else or why it got such results. Then she had studied the other ladies around her, how they had interacted with people and she had understood. 

They softened themselves. They lowered their eyes, they let their mouths gentle into soft smiles and allowed pretty words to flutter from them. Nesta did none of that, none of the things that propriety demanded of her, none of the social niceties her mother had tried so hard to instil in her when she’d been younger. 

Nesta stood at her full height, her neck straight, her chin high. She looked them in the eyes when she spoke to them and would not drop her gaze for some man, no matter how important he may think himself. She had not smiled prettily and she had not bound up her order in so many frills and laces that it suddenly felt more request than order. Nesta demanded what she wanted and stood and watched until it was done. 

Cassian may have commanded thousands in battles, slaughtered countless foes, might be one of the most powerful people in this court, in the whole of Prythian, but he’s still a man, and he still bows before that implacable will that was never meant to be hers. There are different kinds of strength in this world...And this is hers. 

Cassian gently taps the Siphon on top of his hand and she watches in fascination as the armour flows back on itself, a ripple of black, like an ocean drawing away from the shore, revealing his bruised, swollen wrist. Right. She’d been right. She’d known she was, known he was injured and yet..Seeing it there so starkly, exactly where her own arm had hurt. It takes every bit of self control she has not to run her fingers over the place on her own body, tied to his by something, something... 

“You know better than to walk around with an injury,” Rhys snaps out at Cassian’s side, jerking her out of her reverie. She gets the sense that this is an argument they’ve had plenty of times over the centuries; one that Cassian never has, and likely never will, properly listen to. 

“I was busy,” Cassian says, a little irritably, not looking at his High Lord. 

No, those hazel eyes remain on her the entire time. She can feel the weight of them as she examines his arm. She tries not to think too much about what it means, that for him, too, this whole tent and everyone in it seems to have been reduced to little more than an irritating buzzing in his ears. A fly buzzing against a window pane trying to get attention while a hurricane tears at the very foundations. 

“And it’ll have healed by morning,” Cassian adds, at last turning away from her, throwing Rhys a look that plainly warns him not to disagree with that assessment. 

Rhys seems happy enough to let the matter lie, in spite of the slight frown creasing his brows, she isn’t. Her fingers gently inspect the wound, pressing and probing, not entirely sure what she’s looking for. Cassian hisses softly, though he doesn’t pull away, and there’s no reproach in his eyes when she meets them again, only something like...Curiosity, or perhaps surprise that she’s taken such an interest in such a minor wound. 

That feeling of uselessness swells in her again as something clenches in her guts, whispering that he’s hurt, he’s  _hurt. S_ ome instinctive part of her urges her to help him, to take away his pain, to do whatever she has to do to make this better for him. Frustration crashes against her an instant later because she doesn’t know  _how_. She never knows how. 

She might have rebelled against that instinct, that instinct to help him; and the source she suspects it comes from, not wholly her own but...But as she slowly raises her eyes and meets his again...She doesn’t want to. She wants to help him. She doesn’t want to see him in pain, even if this is a stupid injury he probably barely even notices.

 She pushes down on her insecurities instead. For him. 

“How do I fix it?” She asks, forcing her voice to remain steady. She doesn’t want them to know, any of them, the inner turmoil this has stirred in her. Though she thinks...She thinks he might know. 

She doesn’t bother asking if she can heal him. She’s known now, for too long, what it is that burns in her veins, what is the Cauldron made her. Elain took away a part of the future, a mirror to that hope for something better ahead of them she had clung to in the cabin, she had clung to it as well in the Cauldron’s depths. Nesta...Nesta had felt and then taken and then  _become_  the death that had claimed her mortal life. 

As she looks up into his face, the blood spattered dark skin, the empty, hollowed blackness in his hazel eyes she knows that he understands her, in a way that no-one else can. The Cauldron Made her into death and he...He was born as one of her servants. Hewn from wind and flame and stone and filled with the power his people most prided to kill. To protect. 

Nesta looks down at his hand, the gentle wrappings she’s wound around it and wonders if, perhaps, she might do that too. If perhaps this power, this icy death that pulses through her, might be wielded like his roaring flame. 

He watches her for another long moment then, after a gentle nudge from her, he lowers himself down onto the log she’s spent most of the evening huddled on top of, sorting out healing supplies. He groans, his body trembling, and she wonders if the exhaustion that seems to have sunk to the bottom of her very bones is her own, or if it’s his. 

This isn’t the first time she’s felt something from him, something that isn’t hers. Her feelings have always been confusing, a shifting, ever-changing torrent, restless as an ocean’s current. She had appeared so calm upon the surface but beneath....She had dismissed it as that to begin with, not sure what she was feeling, certain it was simply the disorientation of being Made. 

Then she had started to see patterns in what was happening. How her feelings would not quite shift or change but- become interrupted by something else. How this had seemed to happen more and more frequently around Cassian. How she had started to...Know things about him, things she could rarely ever sense in anyone. She knew what he was feeling, what he was thinking, knew when he was hurt even though no-one else could see. 

She knows what it is, knows what it means. She isn’t an idiot, after all....Yet she has no idea what to do about it. She doesn’t know if he feels it too, if he gets things from her, if she somehow sends them to him. She doesn’t  _know_. She doesn’t need to. She doesn’t need to do anything about it at all if she doesn’t acknowledge it. 

He probably thinks she can’t feel anything, if he knows. Feyre and Elain had been ignorant of theirs, and from what Rhys has said, the lengthy explanations, for Elain’s benefit, that she’s listened to every word of...It’s easy to pretend. Easy to keep the mask up. Easy to act as though everything is fine despite the fact it’s not. She’s done that most of her life. 

“Icing it usually helps,” he says after a long moment in which he’d settled himself. “But wrapping it will just lock it in place long enough for the sprain to repair itself and-” 

She doesn’t let him finish. Before he can try and brush it off again and insist that he doesn’t need her, or anyone else’s, help, she reaches for the basket of bandages she’s spent the battle preparing. She’s shocked at how many are there, how many she had produced lost in that haze of focus and clarity that had drawn her away from reality. 

Bending over him she takes up a pitcher of water and cleans the mud and gore from his wrist and hand. His rough calluses sometimes catch on her delicate skin but she doesn’t react, acts as though this is typical, something she would have done for anyone but...But he has no way of knowing how unusual this is for her.

 Feyre might, perhaps. They’ve never been physically affectionate, certainly not in the way that sisters should be. It had always made her uncomfortable, this kind of proximity, this kind of contact, and she had spent most of her life avoiding it. Even when she’d been a child she had never been free and open with herself, her affection. 

With him, though...There’s a rightness so profound in touching him, in the feeling of her fingers brushing over his skin, touching him, comforting him this way, that it’s near holy. It terrifies her. Panic bursts through her body at it. It’s never felt like this with anyone else, never. She’s tolerated contact with others, she’s never wanted it, craved it,  _needed_  it the way she needs this. She’s always counted down the seconds until it would end but now she’s counting her pounding heartbeats and every one that passes where she’s allowed to touch him like this feels like a gift. 

 A part of her wants to say that it’s just the bond, manipulating her, making her feel these things for some male that fate or whatever other ridiculous superstition the fae believe lies behind this piece of twisted magic but...She knows that it’s not. She knows that it’s just  _him_. 

Placing down the pitcher of water she dries his wrist and peers at it critically again for a few moments, studying the pattern of the bruising, where the swelling is, categorising, memorising, storing it away for later. Then she takes up her bandages and starts gently winding them around his arm, trying to ignore the feeling that pulses through her whenever they connect skin to skin. 

She finds that she has to prompt him through the process, asking if what she’s doing is too tight or too loose...If it’s actually helps. He responds with a series of variously pitched grunts and feeble head nods that she interprets without too much difficulty. 

Her concentration narrows on the task, on him. She goes deaf even to the crackling fire, a typically ever present stain on the silence. All she seems able to hear now is the sound of his rough, ragged breathing. It’s a comforting rasp against her ears, a constant reassurance. She’s been training herself not to listen, to drown out the repetitive, infuriating sounds but...As she closes her eyes, letting herself waver for just a moment, a moment none of them notice save him, she lets the soft, rhythmic sounds of his heartbeat. 

 His eyes are still on her, watching her face, her movements, wondering at them. She knows how she appears, how cold, how withdrawn and disconnected, it certainly is a marvel, Nesta Archeron willingly helping another but. Something tugs in her chest at that, like a cord tied to her rib that he gently plucks. Unable to help herself, unsure if he was aware of what he was doing, she looks up at him, sees the reproach in his eyes, as though he knows exactly what she’s just thought and felt and as though...As though he can’t bear her pain any more than she can bear his. 

At last, she ties the bandage off and watches him flex his fingers, testing it. She stuffs the rest of the bandages into her basket without looking at him. The intimacy of what they’ve just done is shuddering through her like a storm, even as a part of her aches as she withdraws from him. 

When she made to pull back though, he reached out with his other hand, wrapping it around her fingers, gently but firmly, stopping her from withdrawing. Compelled by something deeper and stronger than even her own stubborn will, she slowly raises her eyes to meet his again. 

Only once she’s looking at him does he murmur the words, “Thank you.” They’re hoarse, stripped and raw from the battle he’s endured but she  _feels_  them, feels the weight of his gratitude slam into her through the bond. 

He is the one who cares for others, the one who places himself between them and anything that may hurt them. He is the shield to guard them against the horrors of this world, the pillar that they lean upon when the weight of their ghosts becomes too much to bear alone. He is the one who binds their injuries, without ever letting them see his own. 

She understands where that thank you comes from, how deeply into his soul he dug to drag it from himself and she can’t pull away from him. Her hand softens in his, fitting with him as though her hands were made for this, to help him, to hold him, to bind them to each other. 

The barbed words that have so often come so easily to her to distance them, to push him away, to maintain the every crumbling semblance of the boundaries between them won’t come. They get stuck in her throat and instead she finds herself simply looking at him. The armour that encases him, scaled like those beasts on the thrones in the Court of Nightmares. The size of him, how strange it feels to look down on this male she’s so used to towering over her, even if she’s only taller by a bare inch standing while he sits. Her eyes skim over the strong lines of his neck, the only skin visible with the armour. Then to his wings, tucked in tight to his body but still magnificent. 

Her eyes at last find his, the intense hazel, the depth of emotion in them that, even with the bond, she struggles to fully read. The intensity of it nearly sends her to her knees but she stands firm before it, a blade slicing through a storm, hypnotised by him. 

His thumb scrapes gently over the back of her hand and the feeling, the roughness of his calluses against the softness of her skin, grounds her. At last she opens her mouth, intending to murmur a soft ‘You’re welcome’ if she can get the words out past the tightness in her throat. 

She never finds out if she can. Instead they’re interrupted by Mor’s concerned voice, “You’re hurt?” 

Cassian rises quickly, pulling his hand from hers and turning to look at Mor, seizing on her distraction to shatter the tension that had been cresting between them, that neither of them had known how to handle. “Nothing for you to cry over, don’t worry,” he tosses out at Mor. 

She can picture the easy smile on his face as she looks away from her. She glances down instead, examining her empty hand, letting her fingers curl gently around the ghost of his, wishing it was still there within hers. 

Setting her jaw she snatches the empty pitcher she had used to clean Cassian’s hands. Remembering suddenly that Feyre and Rhys were there she mutters a hasty excuse to them about fetching more water from the tent she strides off. 

As she does she finds herself grateful for Mor’s timely interruption, the perfect excuse it had given her not to reply to him, to draw away and leave. She spends a long time in the tent, far longer than she needs to to collect water, braced over the bench, trembling. 

She has no idea what happened tonight, with Cassian, why she would let herself become so vulnerable with him. She has no idea what to do with these feelings, why she can still feel that pull to him. She has no idea how to stop her hands from shaking when even clenching them into tight fists. She has no idea how to come to terms with the fact that she’s falling in love with Cassian, with her mate. And that the more he softens her, the more he exposes her...The more he seems to fall in love with her, too. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Please fuel more Nessian garbage with comments, if you'd like that.


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